Before You Know Kindness Read Online Free PDF Page B

the snap and crack of rifle fire, and perhaps a deer might even be killed within sight of the house. But obviously Willow had seen dead deer in Vermont: Surely she’d noticed the newly killed animals when they were weighed on the big outdoor scales at general stores and town offices or when the disemboweled carcasses were hung out to dry on a house’s front porch. Her own father had taken up the sport last year to vent whatever midlife steam had begun to accrue in his bones, and he’d actually spent four or five days tromping through the snow and the cold in the woods. Apparently he’d seen a doe and then a doe and a fawn but no bucks that either he could or would have shot.
    His hobby was a family secret of which only she and Sara and Willow were aware. John Seton owned some kind of Adirondack brand rifle, a scope (and she’d held the little spyglass in her hands before he had attached it to the rifle barrel) that made things hundreds of yards distant look like they were a mere arm’s length away, and camouflage clothing from some company with the frightening name of Predator that was crafted from a material with the equally disturbing moniker of Stealthtex. The fabric was wind and rain resistant, and when John was wearing it in the woods he was, supposedly, invisible if the conditions were right.
    Well, not completely invisible. He also wore an orange cap with earflaps for safety, and the color was such an ill-advised shade—and
so
visible—that it looked at first as if he had wrapped his head in police tape when he modeled it for her.
    She and her daughter-in-law both hoped this was a temporary fixation, triggered largely by Sara’s amnio. When Sara and John had learned their little baby was going to be a boy, John had started babbling about how in years to come he and his son might do some real north country male bonding and bag themselves a buck. She’d presumed he was kidding, and Sara—who was on the phone with them when he called with the news—said that she wished that he were. No such luck. By the time hunting season rolled around the second Saturday in November, he had taken his Hunter Education and Safety course and gotten his hunting license for the sixteen-day rifle season.
    Nan knew that her vegetarian daughter and son-in-law in Manhattan—oh, God, especially her son-in-law—could never be privy to the reality that John Seton owned a gun and hoped to use it someday to kill a deer. They would be appalled. Spencer would be particularly furious, and there was nothing more unendurable than Spencer McCullough’s self-righteous indignation. At her sixty-fifth birthday party at the Colony Club, she had overheard David Linton, a retired bank economist and the husband of one of her bridge pals, Marisa Linton, admonishing Spencer very good-naturedly about some of FERAL’s stunts, the realities of supply and demand in a free market, and how nowhere in the world was good meat more affordable than in the United States. And so when it was his turn to stand and raise his champagne flute, Spencer had toasted her warmly but then gone on to rebuke everyone who was eating the Colony Club’s beef Wellington—one of the two entrees she had chosen for the party, the other being a pasta primavera specifically for Catherine and Spencer and Charlotte—while insisting that FERAL did nothing ever but point out the obvious, and no one in the room would be eating that beef if they’d seen a cow emerge onto a slaughterhouse kill floor or been forced to witness a steel bolt being blasted into its forehead to stun it before it was butchered. She vaguely recalled him saying something next about the animal’s tongue sticking out from between its teeth in shock and incredulity, but he was (once again) becoming such a spoilsport that by then she was trying hard to tune him out.
    Which brought her back to posting. John and Sara wouldn’t care if she chose to stop posting her land. If there was going to be any resistance to the